A blazing fire, a blast of cold, a new supercomputer

A blazing fire may have preceded the National Weather Service's purchase of a new weather forecasting supercomputer, but on Tuesday the unveiling of the 26th fastest computer in the world was welcomed with a blast of cold and snow.

The new computer can make 690 billion computations per second, giving forecasters at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration agency a five-fold increase in speed, Weather Service officials announced Tuesday as a cold wave blanketed the Eastern seaboard. The IBM Corp. system will be able to make 2.5 trillion computations per second when it is upgraded next September and will be 28 times faster than its predecessor by the end of its lifecycle.

"This supercomputer gives us the ability to run better simulations and give more accurate forecasts with longer lead times," said Jack Kelly, director of the Weather Service. More accuracy is expected because the increased speed allows forecasters to focus on smaller areas.

Showing how the system was working, Louis Uccellini, director of the Weather Service's National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP), cited a possible snowfall of 2 to 6 inches in and east of the Washington area four days in the future. "Our models predict a cyclone developing on the East Coast causing snow in the Washington, D.C., region on Thursday," Uccellini said. Points north and east of Maryland could receive a foot of snow, followed by extreme cold, he said.

The new supercomputer replaces a Cray C-90 supercomputer that began malfunctioning in August 1999 and had a fire in its power supply on Sept. 27. Over-enthusiastic firefighters sprayed the insides of the $30 million Cray with an ordinary fire extinguisher, whose residue left it beyond repair.

Computer rooms are normally supplied with special carbon dioxide-based fire extinguishers for use on valuable equipment, but NCEP officials said firefighters had grabbed an all-purpose carbonate extinguisher outside the data center in Suitland, Md.

"Just before firefighters entered the computer room, they took a General Services Administration-issued fire extinguisher, opened up the Cray with pry bars and put out the fire," said Carl Staton, director of central operations for the centers. "If the only problem had been the power supply we would have been back in business in three to six hours. We would have swapped the power supply out or wired around it somehow. The problem was that the fire department was very thorough in applying the chemical dry carbonate-it is the residue of the fire extinguisher that has caused us our biggest problem."

Even before the fire, the Navy's Fleet Numerical Meteorology and Oceanography Center had shouldered the burden of the nation's weather forecasting on its supercomputer because of the malfunctions.

The fire "left us without a functioning supercomputer," said Staton. "As a result of this incident we have ensured that all fire extinguishers are carbon dioxide-based and are approved for putting out fires in computers." Fire extinguishers not appropriate for use on computers will be labeled: do not use on computers, Staton said.

"Firefighters are supposedly trained to use fire extinguishers and know what they are doing," said Stewart Levy, senior fire protection engineer at the General Services Administration. "But the question here is how do you label fire extinguishers effectively for the fire department."

Because the weather service already was planning to install the newer supercomputer, the loss of the Cray was not as crippling as it could have been. Asked what they would have done with the Cray C-90 after the IBM's implementation, officials said they would have designated it as surplus.

Weather officials ran into another problem when structural problems were discovered in the Suitland building in which the IBM supercomputer was installed. They were forced to shut down the supercomputer and move it to the Commerce Department's Census Bowie Computer Center in Bowie, Md. A benefit of the move was better access to a high-speed network for dissemination of raw forecasting data.